Witty, urbane, lyrical Shakespeare peer

A Life

By Ian Donaldson

Oxford University Press. 512 pp. $39.95

As a huge Ben Jonson fan, I welcome the great Ben Jonson: A Life, a magisterial work by Ian Donaldson, perhaps the single most accomplished Jonson scholar.

This is a measured, comprehensive book written with style, sympathy for his subject, and scholarly balance. Other good Jonson bios are out there - I'll mention my dissertation adviser David Riggs' Ben Jonson, a Freudian approach, and a fine one - but for sheer reach, grasp, and panache, there may never be a better one than this.

Jonson's comedies (The Alchemist, Every Man in His Humor, Epicene, and the astonishing Bartholomew Fair) are some of the funniest in English, or most graceful (Volpone) or most politically knowing and trenchant (Sejanus, Cataline). Hilarious, somber, urbane, moralistic, pious, lyrical, and dirty, he's in the handful of the best, most versatile of poets.

He's been overshadowed - but who hasn't? - by his friend Will Shakespeare. Most of Ben's dramas haven't worn as well as Will's - although, go see them onstage and then tell me what you think. They move and sing and make you marvel at Ben's wit, teeming brain, and ear for dialogue. Anyway, he doesn't need me to argue for him. He lived at a time when a couple dozen of the best-ever poets, from Will to Mary Wroth, from Walter Raleigh to John Webster, were all alive and writing, and he is preeminent among almost all of them.

Also singular among them, in that his life is very well documented, the best-documented life of a Renaissance writer not of noble birth. He made sure, publishing a lot; writing a lot of letters, especially to scholars and other writers; getting into a lot of trouble; and working at the court of James I.

Attracting enemies, advisers, and followers - suggesting that he had charisma, energy, and occasional violent unreason - he became famous throughout the land during his own life, in a way Shakespeare does not seem to have done. After all, Shakespeare is buried in the town church at Stratford, and Ben is buried - vertically! - in Westminster Abbey. His funeral gathering in 1637 was reported as huge, nobles and gentles thronging to bid farewell to the best-loved poet of the city.